Skip to content

Friday Night Music

Friday, January 24, 2014

What can I say? It is cold outside.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

Scientific proof that red states are full of yahoos

Thursday, January 23, 2014

There is nothing quite so satisfying than having your preconceptions scientifically confirmed. Of course, when they are so confirmed, you don't question the solidity of the science.

I've written numerous times about the fact that there is a clear difference between red states and blue states. By almost any commonly agreed metric, we are better than them, and to boot, statistics seem to show that the red states in particular fail to practice what they preach. They preach fiscal austerity and personal responsibility, for instance, but absorb far more tax dollars than they emit. They preach religious virtue, but in practice, well…

Among other things the rate of divorce, teen pregnancy, etc., are all higher in the red states than the blue. How can this be, you might ask, when those states are full of devout family values Christians. Well, it is no surprise that divorce and teen pregnancy rates in the red states are higher because those states are full of devout family values Christians:

In a new study titled “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates,” which will be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology, demographer and University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Glass set out to discover why divorce rates would be higher in religious states like Arkansas and Alabama – which boast the second and third highest divorce rates, respectively – but lower in more liberal states like New Jersey and Massachusetts.

It was previously thought that socioeconomic hardships in the South were largely to blame for high divorce rates, however Glass and her fellow researchers concluded that the conservative religious culture is in fact a major contributing factor thanks to “the social institutions they create” that “decrease marital stability.”

Specifically, putting pressure on young people to marry sooner, frowning upon cohabitation before marriage, teaching abstinence-only sex education and making access to resources like emergency contraception more difficult all result in earlier childbearing ages and less-solid marriages from the get-go, Glass writes in the paper.

“It’s surprising,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, told The Los Angeles Times. “In some contexts in America today, religion is a buffer against divorce. But in the conservative Protestant context, this paper is showing us that it’s not.”

via The Huffington Post

Unlike Mr. Wilcox, I'm not at all surprised. I would, however, be interested in knowing the “contexts in America today” in which religion really is “a buffer against divorce”.

So, as I said, this confirms my preconceptions, so it must be correct. Actually, you could probably arrive at the same result through the process of induction (or is it deduction? …whatever) without the rigorous science that I'm sure went into this study.

In any event, yet more proof, if any were needed, that we don't need no religion round here.

Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

You can always judge a person by the company they keep

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I am among those who believe Chris Christie is now toast, so, as my good news post of the week, I pass on for your consideration a few thoughts about what we may have avoided. Via naked capitalism, I came across this article, which gives us chapter and verse on the Christie threat. We are reminded once again, as our parents taught us, that you can learn a lot about somebody by the company they keep:

Wall Street was unable to mask Mitt Romney’s cloying sense of entitlement and elitism, along with his Mr. Rogers blandness. But Wall Street sees in the profane, union-busting New Jersey governor the perfect Trojan horse for unfettered corporate power. Christie, eyeing a bid for the presidency in the 2016 election, has been promised massive financial backing by the Koch brothers; hedge fund titans such as Stanley Druckenmiller, Kenneth C. Griffin, Daniel S. Loeb, Paul E. Singer, Paul Tudor Jones II and David Tepper; financiers such as Charles Schwab and Stephen A. Schwarzman; real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman; former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso; former AIG head Maurice “Hank” Greenberg; former Morgan Stanley CEO John J. Mack; former GE Chairman Jack Welch; and Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone. David Koch has called Christie “a true political hero” and said he is “inspired by this man.” Rupert Murdoch, whose ethics seem to align with Christie’s, is similarly besotted with the governor.

Talk about the scum of the earth. But it's not just the rich that are drooling at the prospect of a Christie presidency. Even die hard Watergate fans will concede that Nixon looks like a kind and gentle soul next to Christie, and as to his potential abuse of the national security state, Nixon can only turn jealously in his grave. The CIA would love the guy.

Do read the entire piece. It's great fun. I agree the Kochs and their ilk will probably get to choose the next Republican nominee, but Christie is one they had a chance to sell to the country, and now that chance is gone. It will, thank the stars (or whatever controls our fates) take them, like the pundits, a while to understand that. They won't want to believe it, cause the pickin's are mighty slim with Christie gone, and they will waste precious time trying to salvage Christie before they accept reality.

I never thought much of Christie's chances, even before Bridgegate, but, if you buy into the theory of alternate universes, there is at least one where, absent the release of those emails, Christie would have become president, and that universe might have been ours. (Okay, if we grant that theory, there's still at least one where he ends up as president, but that strains credulity. )

So, good news. We have likely avoided what could have been (lets face it, still will be, but not as bad) a terrible four years.

But, of course, if he somehow gets elected anyway, I will have to eat these words, though it will be the least of all our problems.

Filed in Good News | | Comments (0)

Thou may shoot thy neighbor (certain conditions apply)

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

It will be interesting to see if a recent Florida case gets the same attention as the Trayvon Martin case or whether, as I predict, we have all grown used to the idea that it is legal to murder people in hoodies in Florida:

On Thursday, an Orlando man shot and killed a 21-year-old who was fleeing his yard. He didn’t appear to be stealing anything, according to witness accounts. He didn’t appear to be threatening anybody. But Claudius Smith said he feared he was a burglar, followed him over the fence to a neighboring apartment complex, where he shot him after he said he felt threatened, according to a confession documented in an Orlando Police Department report. Smith even said he feared victim Ricardo Sanes was armed “because his pants were falling down” and his hands were in his hoodie pockets, according to a report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

…

According to statements by Smith’s girlfriend, Angela Kemraj, to police, the incident started when she saw a man in the yard on surveillance cameras and reported it to Smith. She said they saw the individual in dark clothes and a hoodie leaving their yard without anything in his hands, and climbing over the fence to a neighboring apartment complex. Smith then left the apartment and climbed over the fence. Two minutes later, Kemraj said she heard gunshots. Soon after, Smith came back to the apartment and said Sanes tried to rob him, without mentioning the shooting. During initial police questioning, Smith later denied knowledge about the shooting, and only later confessed, claiming he shot in self-defense.

via Think Progress

This particular article does not give us the information we need to determine whether the legal prerequisites for a “stand your ground” defense have been established. One element of the defense is that the shooter be white; another that the victim be a color other than white, though the range of permissible colors is quite broad. We aren't told whether the victim was unarmed, which also appears to be a necessary element in the defense, though, to be fair to the reporter, that element is at least implied. Here we know neither the shooter's color, the victim's color, or the extent of the victim'sarmed status, so it is really quite impossible to say whether the defense actually applies, though my guess is that it does and will.

Filed in American Life, Crazies | | Comments (0)

Time to ditch the constitution (or large parts of it)

Thursday, January 16, 2014

It is sometimes amazing how, in the most unlikely places, we find a tendency in our government to find ways to shovel money to those least in need. Latest case in point, at least latest case to come to my attention:

Greg Noll, a senior at Columbia University, balances his engineering major with a federally subsidized “work-study” job at the university’s fitness center, where he fills spray bottles, wipes sweat off the machines, and picks up towels for twenty hours a week. The $9-an-hour wage he’s paid is underwritten by the federal work-study program, which was launched in 1964 to support low-income students who would not otherwise be able to afford college.

While Noll and his counterparts at Columbia and other pricey, top-tier private colleges and universities no doubt benefit from the program—Noll says he uses the money to buy books and food and to go out with his friends on the weekends—they are not necessarily the intended recipients of aid from the $1.2 billion federal program. Noll’s family, for instance, makes $140,000 a year, which he says, rightly, puts them squarely in the upper-middle class. In fact, researchers at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, have found that only 43 percent of students who receive work study meet the federal definition of financial need as determined by whether they also receive Pell Grants. Work study “disproportionately benefits the students who need it the least,” says Rory O’Sullivan, research and policy director at the youth advocacy organization Young Invincibles.

A major source of the problem stems from the fact that the work-study program uses a fifty-year-old formula to determine how federal funds are allocated. Unlike other federal financial aid programs that distribute money according to how many students at a university actually need aid, money for the work-study program is based instead on how much a university received the previous year, and how much it charges for tuition.

That perpetuates a system under which the universities that get the lion’s share of federal dollars are not the ones with the most low-income students but, rather, those that have been participating in work study the longest and charge the highest tuition. Consequently, nearly half of work-study recipients attend private, nonprofit universities and colleges.

via The Washington Monthly

Perhaps one reason civilizations decline is that they become ever more encumbered by irrational impediments to progress. This is a small example, but the near certainty that nothing will be done about it illustrates the broader problem. How often are civilizations able to sweep away outdated traditions and policies that no longer serve a broader purpose but do serve entrenched interests? It can happen. Consider that England did, among other 19th century reforms, get rid of rotten boroughs. But we face impediments England did not, prime among them our written constitution , which is showing its considerable age, but which has become, in its main elements, unalterable holy writ. It was not always thus, we changed the way Senators were elected at a time when plutocrats were quite literally buying Senate seats. The plutocrats are in charge again, but we seem powerless to turn on them.

Addendum: After writing this, I put it aside. I probably would have left it aside, until I came upon an article in Harpers (can't find a link) by a Frenchman (and surely we needn't iisten to one of those), Jean-Philippe Immarigeon, who suggests that what we need is an injection of the parliamentary system's ability to call new elections at the drop of a hat, so to speak. The theory is that if Congress obstructs, the president can call for elections to try to break the logjam. Optimistic, I think, as we'd quite likely get an even worse Congress. Really, while it might help somewhat, the real problem lies in the fact that the states where the people are (which are or will be primarily blue) are woefully under represented in the Senate in addition to be gerrymandered into powerlessness in the House. But Immarigeon does perform a useful service by calling for the unimaginable: an overhaul to our antiquated form of government. It won't happen if no one talks about it. It probably won't happen if we do, but it's at least possible.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (0)

I know you’ve probably already seen this

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Couldn’t resist.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

What could go wrong, bitcoin edition

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Okay, I'm not an economist, so I can't give you chapter and verse about why this does not bode well, but it seems to me that packaging derivatives to protect bitcoin investors just can't end well:

Coinbase now handles bitcoin transactions for more than 19,000 businesses and 750,000 individuals.

The tiny San Francisco startup offers various online services that help move the digital currency from place to place. At online retailer Overstock.com, for instance, Coinbase helps people buy stuff like patio furniture and smartphone cases using bitcoin. It lets online advertising outfit eZanga pay its partners in bitcoins. And it provides a service that lets people and businesses buy and sell the digital currency.

As a result, Coinbase holds an awful lot of bitcoin in its own digital wallets. That’s just part of efficiently moving the currency to and fro — and at this point, it’s a rather risky thing. As the world struggles to come to terms with this very new creation, the value of the digital currency is extremely volatile, with prices shifting as much as 25 percent in a matter of minutes.

Founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam say the company runs complex software that monitors price fluctuations and responds almost instantly in an effort to avoid serious losses. But they also say Coinbase could benefit from something else, something that businesses so often use to protect themselves when they handle foreign currencies like euros and yen. They could use a derivatives market.

…

Derivatives markets have long played a role in the traditional economy. If you, say, sell a bunch of stuff to Germany and are paid in euros, you run the risk of the euro suddenly dropping in value relative to the dollar. In other words, when it comes time to spend them, your euros could be worth far less than when you received them. But you can protect yourself by purchasing something called a futures derivative — a financial instrument that pays you money if the value of the euro goes down. “It’s basically an insurance policy against fluctuations in exchange rates,” Posner says.

via Wired

Gee, what could possibly go wrong? I'm not sure what, in this context, the difference between derivatives and swaps might be, but if derivatives are basically insurance policies against fluctuations in rates, then, when it comes to bitcoins, there doesn't seem to be much difference. Basically, you are insuring against the collapse of a bubble, and we all know how well that worked for AIG, et. al. This is not, as the article implies, analagous to derivatives designed to protect against currency fluctuations. The dollar, for instance, is legal tender, and will have value as long as the United States exists,. It may go up or down against other currencies, but it must, by definition, always have value here. Bitcoins can, and probably will, lose every cent of their “value”.

At least at the moment, it appears that the too-big-to-fails aren't getting into the market, but if there's a dime to be made they will, since they know our dollars will be there if things go South.

The article doesn't say, so I'm left curious. If the bitcoin value does goes South, will these derivitaves pay off in dollars, or bitcoins?

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Bad moon rising

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

An Appeals Court has just struck down the FCC's attempt to impose net neutrality. That ruling, and the rise of the app, may very well spell the end of the independent voices, such as your humble blogger, that have, to a some extent, managed to fight back against the now very much right wing mainstream media. (I do not wish to imply that I am a significant actor in that fight, but Kos, Josh Marshall and their ilk have certainly been a counterweight to a media that tows the corporate line, and the cumulative effect of us little guys cannot be denied.)

We get a bit of a preview of the brave new world that awaits us from an old media example, the Washington Post, which still rests on its Watergate laurels while serving the interests of the 1%:

American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain. A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos – who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder. The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”

The Washington Post’s refusal to provide readers with minimal disclosure in coverage of the CIA is important on its own. But it’s also a marker for an ominous pattern – combining denial with accommodation to raw financial and governmental power – a synergy of media leverage, corporate digital muscle and secretive agencies implementing policies of mass surveillance, covert action and ongoing warfare.

via Norman Solomon at Consortium News

Jeff Bezos may not seem like an evil man, but he does evil things behind his corporate mask. The demise of net neutrality will play perfectly into the hands of men like him, who think first, last and always of the dollar. We can expect that someday soon the only information we can get on the net will be the type of n ot-quite-propaganda we get from Bezo's Post: slanted to suit the needs of the 1% first, and the surveillance state thereafter.

Of course, it would be an easy matter for Congress to reverse the court's ruling.

Yes, I know. I'm laughing too.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Remarkable people

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Saturday morning my attention was drawn to an article in the Boston Globe about a couple who had just donated millions of dollars worth of art to Bowdoin College. I began to read the article only because Bowdoin is my alma mater. I assumed that the couple involved were rich alumni, or, given Bowdoin's history as a male college until the year I graduated, the husband was a rich alumni. But the story was far more interesting than that.

In fact, the headline was a little misleading; half of the couple is dead. It was Dorothy Vogel, Herbert Vogel's widow and his partner in art acquisition, that made the donation. Their story is truly inspiring:

Herbert, a postal clerk who never graduated from high school, and Dorothy, a reference librarian, used their modest income to acquire an estimated 5,000 artworks that Forbes.com once described as “worth incalculable amounts: hundreds of millions of dollars and climbing.”

The couple packed it all into their rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment in New York. Art filled closets and was piled under the bed and stacked high in boxes; they made room for more by clearing out a sofa and other furniture. Roaming around the artworks were several cats with names such as Manet and Renoir, and they had a menagerie of turtles and fish.

The Vogels ultimately gave most of the art away. But now the Bowdoin College Museum of Art has received a major gift of 320 works of contemporary art from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, one of the most storied and significant collections of contemporary art in the United States. Nearly 70 artists are represented in that gift, including painters Julian Schnabel and Pat Steir and multimedia artist Richard Tuttle.

via The Boston Globe

They bought the art using his Post Office salary and lived on her income. They bought works by artists they knew and cultivated.

“Their collecting practice was very prescient. They managed to get in at the ground level with some of the most important artists of their day,” says Molly Donovan, curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art.

So how cool is that?

And they did it all for love, it appears. They could have cashed in for millions, but they gave it all away, except for a few pieces Dorothy Vogel is keeping in case of financial emergency. Awe inspiring, really and I must say I'm proud they picked Bowdoin for their gift. Some small solace in light of the fact that we have Stanley Druckenmiller to live down.

Filed in American Life | | Comments (0)

Proof that capitalism can’t work

Saturday, January 11, 2014

I am a member of the board of an organization which is so pathetic that it recently elected me chair. In furtherance of my duties, I proposed to set up a shared Dropbox folder, which I attempted to do last night. I experienced difficulties sharing the folder. I did a bit of investigating and discovered to my dismay that the Dropbox service was down.

Now, this is a service that has been around for a while. This was not a question of start up woes like those that plagued HealthCare.gov. This inexplicable failure to provide perfect and bug free service is obvious proof that private enterprise is a total failure. This morning, the service is still down. This means that millions of people have been deprived of access to their files for at least 15 hours, a longer wait than that experienced on healthcare.gov. The only solution is to 1) force Dropbox to cease doing business; 2) abandon the entire idea of cloud based storage; and 3) dismantle the free enterprise system.

I mean, I even had to save this post to local storage on my Ipad instead of syncing to a dropbox folder as I normally would. This kind of torture can't go on.

I'm writing this now because I want to be first with this meme, as I'm sure the right wing, consistent as always, will be trumpeting capitalism's failure any minute now.

Filed in Health Care | | Comments (0)